As technology continues to advance, more methods of tracking nearly every aspect of a business are developed. Customers' interactions on websites can be tracked. Users' posts to social networks can be tracked. Detailed sales, logistics, and marketing effectiveness data is collected and analyzed. Data sets will continue to grow in size and complexity because they are increasingly being gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, remote sensing technologies, software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification technology, and a plethora of other sensor networks and tracking systems which exist all around us. In sum, about 90% of the data in the history of the world today was created within the past two years. With the advances in the collection of data hitting the market with such force, businesses are facing the ever-daunting challenge of figuring out how to most effectively manage these petabytes of information to achieve their business goals.
Currently, businesses have multiple off-the-shelf options for implementing database systems to store their valuable customer data, however, none of these systems are directed to use in an application service provider (ASP) environment. Some systems, such as those based on the Shared Nothing concept, are created to quickly access data across the database by using independent memory and processors at each node. Such systems may be useful for a small number of individual users and teams, but experience scalability issues in a high-volume multitenant environment. Other forms of databases are designed to compress and store as much information as possible. These platforms are slow and have a high transaction cost due to compressing and linking amongst data elements.
There exists a need for an improved method of storing business intelligence wherein the overall cost of ownership and burden of management is reduced in a high-volume multi-tenant environment. There further exists a need for a storage platform wherein data can be quickly and efficiently stored, as well as accessed at a high rate of speed in order to provide on-the-fly information to multiple data owners.
Other problems and drawbacks also exist.